Genetic information can be analyzed for a number of applications, including medical diagnosis, genotyping, and forensics. The high throughput analysis of nucleic acid samples is facilitated by nucleic acid amplification.
A variety of techniques can be used for nucleic acid amplification. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR; Saiki, et al. (1985) Science 230, 1350-1354) and ligase chain reaction (LCR; Wu. et al. (1989) Genomics 4, 560-569; Barringer et al. (1990), Gene 1989, 117-122; F. Barany. 1991, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 1988, 189-193) utilize cycles of varying temperature to drive rounds of synthesis. Transcription-based methods utilize RNA synthesis by RNA polymerases to amplify nucleic acid (U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,066,457, 6,132,997, and 5,716,785; Sarkar et al., Science (1989) 244:331-34; Stofler et al., Science (1988) 239:491). NASBA (U.S. Patent Nos. 5,130,238; 5,409,818; and 5,554,517) utilizes cycles of transcription, reverse-transcription, and RNaseH-based degradation to amplify a DNA sample. Still other amplification methods include rolling circle amplification (RCA; U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,854,033 and 6,143,495) and strand displacement amplification (SDA; U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,455,166 and 5,624,825).